The Art of State Trolling — a Growing Market

Last week, while I was doing a num­ber of talks for Fun​z​ing​.com in Lon­don, I was invited into RT to dis­cuss a new report about the US mil­it­ary advert­ising for pro­gram­mers who could devel­op soft­ware that tar­geted Ira­ni­an, Chinese and Rus­si­an audi­ences via social media.

The tim­ing proved inter­est­ing. Only days before, it was revealed by @musalbas at the CCC and then via Wikileaks that the UK gov­ern­ment listen­ing post, GCHQ, had appar­ently been doing the same thing since 2009.

And then, coin­cid­ent­ally, only a couple of days after the US dis­clos­ure, it was repor­ted that Rus­sia was now trolling Wiki­pe­dia.

A war of words ensued — and let’s hope that is all it remains. How­ever, this report in the NYT today fills me with dread.

Here is my con­tri­bu­tion from last week:

Pentagon devel­op­ing auto­mated social media troll farms from Annie Machon on Vimeo.

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